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Pushing buttons: Generals coach takes a stand for his team

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Waynesboro Generals coach D.J. King was tossed from Tuesday’s game with the Charlottesville Tom Sox for arguing with the home-plate umpire. And yes, getting tossed from a game – and getting hit with a four-game suspension as a result – is a bad thing.

It may also have been a necessary thing.

Try as you might to make it anything else, sports is a business, and a job, and as much as some want to divorce the wins and the losses from the business part of sports, the job part of sports, the wins and losses are what makes that world go ‘round.

Which isn’t saying that sports is any different than any other part of life. You think you’re being wronged, you stand up for yourself, because who else is going to stand up for you?

The answer there is obvious: nobody.

It’s also true that nobody likes getting thrown out of a game or getting suspended for four games. Getting ejected and suspended means you can’t do your job.

Getting back to King and the Generals: right or wrong, the coach felt he had to take a stand. He’d already seen two of his players thrown out of the game, one (Joseph Estrada) on a hair-trigger ejection after expressing momentary displeasure with the strike zone, the second (Kevin Phillips) after an opponent slammed into his guy on a tag at the end of a rundown, and his guy retaliated, and we know how that goes in terms of the guy who retaliates being treated as the primary offender.

King was trying to make a point that he just wanted his team to get the same treatment as the guys in the other dugout.

The discussion got heated, and since coaches don’t have the ability to throw umpires out of the game and write official reports to the league office defending their actions, he was sent packing early with the rest of the week off.

That the Generals fought back in the ninth inning to rally for a 5-4 win isn’t coincidental to what happened with King in the seventh.

His team, struggling at the moment through a two-game losing skid that was about to extend to three, saw its coach literally fighting for them on the field.

The players, to a man, had no choice but to respond in kind.

In a day and age where our political leaders are too busy reading which way the wind is blowing to take any kind of stand, where our kids are taught that just showing up will get you a trophy for participation, and the rest of us distract ourselves with sharing photos of what we’re eating, it’s refreshing to see somebody actually trying to accomplish something.

Might just be me, but I want a leader willing to put it all on the line.

– Column by Chris Graham

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